Failed contraception?
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2004
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South African Medical Journal
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University of Cape Town
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The frequency, cost and harms of the procedure must have been weighed up by the British National Health Service (NHS) — usually pretty sensible about their medical recommendations — which proposed 3-yearly screening for women aged between 50 and 64 years. Obviously more cancers would be discovered by 2-yearly rather than 3-yearly screening, and yet more by annual screening. Six-monthly screening, in turn, would clearly yield more cancers than annual screening. This would fit well with Dr Whitehorn’s ‘simple arithmetic’. However a balance has to be found between benefits and harms, and we chose the NHS one. The following organised screening programmes recommend 2- yearly mammography, most of them for women between 50 and 69 years: Australia, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Greece. Annual mammography, and mammography at an early age are the usual recommendations of interest groups. They are also the recommendation of the correspondence printed above. Like Dr Paul Sneider, we conclude with a quote from Boyle: ‘Every woman has a right to participate in an organised screening program . . .’. This right, alas, does not apply to this country, where other health care priorities make an organised programme an impossibility. However, should a woman have the privilege of medical aid, or be able to afford mammography, it is her choice to undergo it, a choice open to only a minority of South Africans. The majority of South African women would, in our opinion, be well served by an organised programme of ‘breast awareness’, a proposal that Dr Russell Whitehorn finds difficult to fathom.
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Morroni, C., Myer, L., & Cooper, D. (2004). Failed contraception?. SOUTH AFRICAN MEDICAL JOURNAL-CAPE TOWN-MEDICAL ASSOCIATION OF SOUTH AFRICA-, 94(8), 600-600.